


The Raging Ones

by Colourofsaying



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode Related, M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-18
Updated: 2012-09-18
Packaged: 2017-11-14 13:06:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/515537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Colourofsaying/pseuds/Colourofsaying
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Later, the Doctor would say that he refused to admit that the Master actually was hearing the drumming, and then retracted his statement because it was patently untrue. Later, the Doctor would say that the Master had got carried away by someone else hearing the drumbeat and had shot up into the night sky like one of those American superheroes with the jetpacks, and everyone would be satisfied, the rest of the night occurring before witnesses.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>...this is essentially electroskeleton!Master porn. I have no regrets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Raging Ones

The Master caught him as he fell, kneeling in the corroded metal dust of the abandoned factory. His motives had been opaque for as long as the Doctor had known him; one could always trust him to do the expected for unexpected reasons. Abruptly, he looked down and away, his mouth twisted in disgust, and dropped the Doctor into the dust.

He was rather on the small side in this incarnation, the Doctor thought as he gasped through the aftershocks on the factory floor, and he looked like a teenager in his too-big clothing and his ragged sneakers, which made it all the more impossible to bear watching him burn his flesh away so frivolously. It was very like the Master to deliver an attack more painful to watch than to feel – not that he was discounting the pain.

It was hard to remember why they were fighting when the Master looked – vulnerable. When he spoke about their childhood. The Doctor remembered those pastures as well as the Master, remembered the red sun on Koschei’s face. When they’d met, the Master had been soft and rounded, like he’d been woven out of all the lushness of Gallifrey, but by those summer afternoons, he’d lost that softness. Become – beautiful.

He was still beautiful. Mad and beautiful and brilliant, like all the best people. It sickened the Doctor to see him like this when his previous madness had been so glorious. Now it was smeared with the taint of the Master’s new body, burning with the botched resurrection, craving and obscene. Such pointless, stupid, idiotic _human_ things, love and jealousy. They’d always been terrible Time Lords. He had a Zero Room now; if he could get the Master back to the TARDIS, if the Master would just accept a little help.

Which was about as likely as the Daleks staying dead. He’d offered before, and the Master had died in his arms rather than let the Doctor give him anything at all. So he asked for help instead. Get this finished, get it over with, and maybe, if he was still alive and the Master was still alive, there’d be enough time – to fix the Master’s dying body. To erase the drumbeat. That inaudible sound the Master had always claimed drove him onwards, the sound he raged against and embraced by turns, the sound that, by all accounts, was giving the Master a really awful migraine at the moment. The sound that the Doctor had always been sure had never existed, except in the Master’s madness.

It was just like the Master to force other people into accepting his point of view. He never did believe in compromise.

The Doctor flinched away from his hands, breathless.

“What?” the Master spat, apparently expecting him to say, once again, that the drumming was entirely in his imagination.

“I heard it,” the Doctor admitted. The drums were real, and the Master had never been delusional, never lied to him, never betrayed him, or at least not by anything of his own doing.

Later, the Doctor would say that he refused to admit that the Master actually was hearing the drumming, and then retracted his statement because it was patently untrue. Later, the Doctor would say that the Master had got carried away by someone else hearing the drumbeat and had shot up into the night sky like one of those American superheroes with the jetpacks, and everyone would be satisfied, the rest of the night occurring before witnesses.

The reality, he thought, they’d find unpalatable, his lovely human companions with their shallow understanding.

They knelt there, puffs of steam dissipating into the air. Any moment now, the Doctor knew, one of them would fuck it up – he’d say something patronizing or insufficiently sympathetic, the Master would lose what attention span he had and go off half-cocked and bitter to do Rassilon only knew what. The last time they’d been this close – other than the incident five minutes ago with the bolts of electricity – the Master had been dying in his arms. Not an atypical interaction.

A thread of blue fizzled across the Master’s knuckles. The Doctor watched it. If the Master was dying again, he could bloody well do at least a little of it in the Doctor’s arms. He reached out slowly, lifted the Master’s hand to his lips, kissed the energy’s path. The Master’s hand tasted of dust and ashes, and blue lightning sizzled against his lips. He looked up, and the Master met his eyes.

The Doctor kissed him, slid his hands under the Master’s shirt, against his too-hot skin and too-thin back. The bones pressed into his palms, and the Master shook into a skeleton against him. He closed his eyes, tasted lightning.

Gently, he pulled off the Master’s hoodie, removed his shirt, kissing the Master’s wrists and collarbone. He shrugged his coat off, spread it out. The Master’s hands pulled at his jacket impatiently, yanking hard at the buttons and shoving it off with a frustrated huff of amusement.

“What is it with you and _layering_?” the Master asked. “Is this some sort of strange Doctor-y form of the chastity belt? You’ve got on _four tops_.”

“I like it,” the Doctor shrugged. He unbuttoned his shirt and pulled off the undershirt under that, tossing them on top of the coat and jacket. England in December was not warm, but the Master seemed invulnerable, moving freely and expansively in the frozen air. Sparks flickered and vanished on his skin in a shifting glittery web.

“You would.” The Master’s hands worked for a moment at his jeans, slid them off his hips. He wasn’t wearing underwear – probably there hadn’t been any hanging off whatever line he’d stolen his clothes from. It looked like the sort of outfit that would be washed together, though the Doctor was a little hazy on the precise mechanics of laundry. The thought was insufficiently distracting; he forgot what his hands had been working at and pulled the Master towards him, kissing him down onto the pile of shirts, running his hands along the Master’s pale sides, squeezing the Master’s arse in one hand before sliding his hands down his leg in a long caress.

The Master shook and his flesh vanished, the Doctor cupping bare blue bones. He set the Master’s foot down gently, finished taking off his trousers.

Light and shadow flickered across his skin from the remnants of the fires.

“Get on with it, will you?” the Master ordered. “I haven’t got all night. Who knows how long I have left? I could die any minute, and I refuse to die while you’ve still got your trousers on.”

“Sit up a minute, I’ve got to reach in my pocket.” The Doctor dug around inside his coat and pulled out a small bottle of olive oil.

“I’m going to go out on a limb here and say you don’t carry that around just in case you happen to run into me,” the Master said.

“Nope. Good for locks, shoe polish, putting Higamarimars to sleep, _and_ it tastes good on bread,” the Doctor told him. “This is just one of its many uses.”

He tipped the Master back down, smoothing the shirts flat beneath his back. Each too-fast breath shook him, quaked through his chest, and when the Doctor kissed it, he shivered into electricity. The Doctor could scarcely feel the body under his mouth, under his hands as they stroked along the Master’s sides, cupped his flesh in his hands. He slid further down, took the Master into his mouth.

The Master arched up, flashed blue and skeletal, and the Doctor had to back off, mouth stinging. He replaced his mouth with his hand, kissing the Master to quiet his indignant whine.

One-handed, he fumbled the bottle open, clumsily spilling the oil over his fingers and onto his thigh. He twisted his fingers together, feeling the slide of the oil coat them slick and warm, then slid one into the Master.

After nine hundred years, sex with the Master was familiar. Even if it was mostly in memory, even if the body had regenerated. He’s relived those memories often enough that each detail is as clear as if it were happening again, though for all their clarity the memories are never anything like reality, never enough He knew what the Master’s face would look like when he was ready, when he was desperate. The way he twisted around the Doctor’s finger was the same. It was even harder to remember why they were fighting when the Master was shifting sweat-sheened in the firelight.

Well, there was the firelight. That helped. The Doctor remembered explosions, the sky burning, _Earth_ burning, and tried to forget Gallifrey burning in the flames of all the many reasons why they waged a never-ending war against each other. He slipped in another finger, listened to the Master swear and curse. It was possible the Master was crying – if he was, the tears were dry before they had left his eyes, evaporated by the electricity of his body.

The Master gasped at him, his head thrown back and so the Doctor bit at his neck, which was long and bare and beautiful stretched before him, an irresistible thing. The skin fizzed against his teeth, and the Master shook beneath him, moaning.

“Doctor! Shut – shut up and _do something_ ,” the Master ordered. “I’m not one of your _humans_.”

The Doctor added a third finger and a particularly complex twist. It was enough to make the Master go boneless, all the tension flashing out for a moment before he was twisted up in knots again, cursing the Doctor for purposefully misunderstanding him. He could whine all he wanted – for all his bluster, the Master was so very fragile, far more fragile than the humans he mocked, and needed more gentleness than it was in anyone to give.

He flickered in and out as the Doctor fingered him, twisting distractedly on the heap of coats as he searched for more sensation. He dug his heels into the ground, arched his back, clawed at the Doctor’s arms. This version of the Master was the least self-conscious the Doctor had ever known. Watching him was like watching the rift – in every moment his thoughts and feelings flared out unchecked, but the change from moment to moment was absolute. For this moment, he was desperate, engrossed in his physicality, euphoric with the adrenaline of terror and desire.

It was the Master’s changeability, in part, that left him lingering over the preparation long after it was sufficient. He was afraid – if he moved, if he took his hands from the Master’s body, even for the breath of time it would take to unfasten his trousers, the moment would be lost and he would have another Master beneath him. He could become violent or poisonous or bitter, he could be affectionate or inconsolable or promise a thousand impossible things, and it would be impossible to match the change.

Once, they’d spent hours heightening desire in brushes of fingertips, lying in a quiet room, saying nothing. It’s been centuries since they’ve had that kind of time.

“Get _on_ with it,” the Master ordered at last, drumming his heels into the Doctor’s back. It hurt. He withdrew his fingers, slipped his trousers over his hips, and spilled more oil into his hand, slicking himself further. The Master wouldn’t like it, but he was dying, he might not regenerate, and if this was the last time than it was damned well going to be smooth and slow and sweet, the kind of sex that built golden, filled you to the brim and gently spilled over.

The Master spasmed around him, flickering in and out of form. It stung, bit into his body, a pain with no source and no alleviation. He left his eyes on the Master’s face, on the Master’s skull. He was beautiful in flesh, beautiful in bone, ecstasy incarnate. Ecstasy in the mad old sense, the wild women on the hill tearing gods to shreds with their bare hands. He kissed the Master’s lips, mouthed at his bones, and the sting of energy seemed to carry the Master’s madness, his frenetic desperation. It bled into him, seeped into his grief and anger and endless never-regretted love until he was weeping with it, the tears sliding down his face and onto the Master’s skin where they sizzled and drowned in steam. It was an English winter in a derelict factory, and this was never going to have been slow and warm and sunlit. He was burning and dying with the Master, lost in the pain and the pleasure, and how much of the hunger was terror, fear of the energy that demanded more life than he had to take?

With every stroke, he wrote the promises he was forbidden to make, unspoken and undeniable in an intimate chaos of skin and motion. He traced his love in scratches and sealed it with bruises and all the pleas he swallowed choked him until he felt like another moment of this frantic physicality would be more than he could bear. The smoke and fire blurred around them as the Master came, spasming around him and stringing every point of contact with the energy of his touch, tearing his own release from him.

They lay there for a moment in the aftermath, the Master warm flesh and living breath and quiet stillness. He tried not to think, lay as still and quiet on the Master’s chest, matched him breath for breath, and felt it in his bones when the drums began, once more, to beat.

**Author's Note:**

> I was told this story needed an orgasm, because without it, it was anticlimactic. So have some orgasms! I've been working at them for an hour and it's one damned paragraph. Title is a similarly resigned reference to Maenads.
> 
> Thanks to Mirrormasque for the beta! Endlessly appreciated! She is my Ezra Pound.


End file.
